Firestorm Page 0,8

his eyes for a second. "What the hell do you think? Not a damn thing we could do, except try to keep them off of us. Too many Wardens died. Way too many."

I felt cold, imagining it. Djinn were like tigers, I'd always thought: beautiful and sleek and deadly when out of control. And this had definitely been way out of control. I remembered David, back on the beach in Florida-- David, who would never have willingly hurt me--coming for me with his eyes glowing red. I'd have died there, if it hadn't been for Imara. And that had been open ground. In an enclosed space like this, no place to run...

"We couldn't stop them," Paul finished softly. "We lost--" He looked momentarily stunned, trying to recall a number.

Down the table, a quiet voice supplied, "At least thirty. We're lucky we have as many here as we do."

"Lucky?" A half-whisper from a battered young man I didn't recognize, with the solid hum of energy that usually tokened an Earth power. "What part of that was lucky, man? I saw people--I saw friends just ripped in half--"

Paul, sighed. "Yeah, kid, I know. Easy. We're going to get through this, okay? Jo, this is pretty much everybody we could pull in that we could reach. Got more on the way, but it's going to take some time to figure out who's still alive and able to help. Plus, we can't yank everybody out. We need them on the ground, especially now." His gaze fell randomly on Cherise, and stayed. "Who's this?"

"Cherise. She's a friend." After a hesitation, I had to clarify, "Not a Warden."

He looked completely pissed off. "What are we running here? A tour group? Get her the hell out of here!"

I looked at Cherise. She was dead scared and didn't know where to look but she especially didn't want to look at the puddles of dried blood on the carpet or the silent, staring faces of the Wardens. "Cher, why don't you wait in the hall?"

"Hell no," she said. "I've been to the movies. No way am I splitting up in the scary place. C'mon, Jo, I want to stay with you. Please?"

She had a point. No telling what kind of dangers were still lurking around the corner. I turned back to Paul. "She stays," I said. He glowered. "Paul, she stays. We don't have time to screw around with who's allowed in the cool kids' room when the house is on fire, right? Just pretend she's an intern or something."

That wouldn't be too hard. Cherise was looking more and more like an out-of-her-depth undergrad.

"So what do we know?" Tasked, and slid into an empty chair. Cherise hastily took the one next to me. I scanned faces around the room and saw about twelve I recognized. Way too many were missing. I had to hope they were still somewhere out there, doing their jobs. I exchanged quick nods with the people I knew.

"We started losing contact with Wardens all over the country about three days ago. Started with just a few, but it spread like wildfire," a lean, weathered woman of about forty said. "It took us a while to understand that they were being attacked by Djinn. No survivors until they came after Marion."

I glanced down the table into shadows, alarmed. I'd seen Marion... Yes, there she was, half-hidden near the end. Marion was an Earth Warden, and her skill was healing, but self-healing was a chancy undertaking at the best of times. She looked terrible. I exchanged another nod with her.

"Marion, I'm so sorry. Your Djinn--?" I didn't know how to finish that question, because Marion and I knew things about each other that really weren't suited to sharing with a table full of strangers. Such as, I knew that Marion had taken enormous risks to recover her lost Djinn, not so very long ago, and it hadn't been out of selfless duty; she and her Djinn were lovers. That fell under the "forbidden tragic love" section of the Warden code, even under normal circumstances; I just didn't know for certain how tragic it had turned out this time.

She took me off the hook. "My Djinn helped me take out the two who came to--to free him. Then he asked me to put him back into his bottle. I did, and sealed it."

"First good advice we had," Paul said. "We've been getting hold of every Warden we can find and telling them the same thing. Get your Djinn